The Halff Collection at the McNay

A century ago, American artists looked to France for instruction and inspiration. The brilliant colors and fractured brushwork of Impressionism charted a new, more modern and urbane course for the artists showcased in An Impressionist Sensibility: The Halff Collection at the McNay Art Museum.

The paintings look dazzling in the natural light of the McNay’s new Stieren wing, and the Halff collection is accompanied by a companion show, TruthBeauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845-1945, drawn from the collections at the George Eastman House. Also on view are Impressionist Graphics from the McNay’s print and drawing collection.

As part of its grand re-opening following a $298 million renovation in 2006, the Smithsonian American Art Museum showcased the Halff Collection, the catalog for which includes an essay by the chief curator, Eleanor Jones Harvey. As she explains, the Halffs started as contemporary art collectors, but switched to the late 19th and early 20th-century after Marie hung a calendar of American impressionism over Hugh’s bathroom scales.

While many of the paintings are light and colorful, three of the best have a dark, Velazquez-like moodiness. In the case of Chase, the artist was directly influenced by an iconic Velazquez work. He painted Ring Toss, featuring three of his young daughters playing the game in his studio, after a trip to Spain where he made a copy of Velazquez’s Las Meninas. The rich brown tones of the floor’s wood grain are contrasted with the murky black shadows of the background, almost forming a stage, with the girls pitching toward the viewer.

Sargent evokes Velazquez with his image of three women emerging from a church. Sortie de l’eglise, Campo San Canciano, Venice, dramatically blends midnight blacks, vivid touches of reds and stone-washed whites. Sargent’s The Sulphur Match is also dark and romantic, featuring the almost obscured face of a man bending to light a match while a woman in a white dress and red shawl leans back in a chair, two lovers lounging in a bar.

Chase, however, is primarily known as a landscape painter. His Shinnecock Landscape with Figures is a more characteristically sunny work. The scene is from Long Island, where Chase taught his famous summer classes. His students included the likes of Rockwell Kent, Charles Hawthorne and Julian Onderdonk, the Texas impressionist known as the father of bluebonnet painting. Chase’s idyllic sun-filled day, his wife and daughters walking amid the wildflowers, reveals how much he influenced Onderdonk’s Hill Country landscapes. It also reflects the artist who influenced most of the artists in this exhibit, James McNeill Whistler. Whistler’s motto of “art for art’s sake” pushed these American painters to take the first steps toward modernism.

All of these artists studied in France, the home of impressionism. Childe Hassam spent four years in Paris from 1886 to 1889, studying at the Acadiemie Julian, and then returned to Boston to paint urban scenes such as Clearing Sunset (Corner of Berkeley Street and Columbus Avenue), with black hansom cabs speeding over the rain-slicked cobble streets of Boston and steam rising from passing trains. Hassam captured the hustle and bustle of a city in transition from the 19th to 20th century. In a much brighter urban scene from 1917, The New York Bouquet: West Forty-Second Street, flags of several countries wave while a newly built 29-story skyscraper glows in the crystalline sunlight.

Theodore Robinson’s ragged brushstrokes evoke a blustery New York cold spell in Union Square, Winter. He and Hassam were among several artists who took advantage of cheap rents in apartments near the square. Another New York winter scene is Ernest Lawson‘s The Flatiron Building, with its distinctive jutting, prow-like visage seen through snow-laden tree branches.

Two of the most interesting landscapes are by Twachtman, who painted the river views from the porch of the Holley House in Cos Cob, Connecticut, during the winter and spring. Fog hangs heavy over a snow-shrouded landscape in Bridge in Winter, with only a few straggly wisps of bare tree branches. But spring is clearly underway in From the Holley House, with blue water running in the river and leaves beginning to sprout from the tree branches.

Images of women reflect the turn-of-the-20th-century fascination with Japan, or “japonisme,” and the Middle and Far East, or “orientalism.” A woman wears a kimono in Charles Sprague Pearce’s Lady with a Fan, while the subjects of Harry Siddons Mowbray’sTwo Womenlounge like fantasies of a Near Eastern harem. Edmund Tarbell painted an American woman sitting on the floor, Japanese-style, while she cuts out kirigami patterns. Whistler began incorporating Japanesque elements into his work during the early 1860s, probably inspired by an exhibit of ukiyo-e prints by Hokusai at the London Exhibition of 1862.

William McGregor Paxton’s Vermeer-influenced portrait of a woman reading a newspaper is one of the most contemporary-looking paintings. But other female portraits reflect the influence of the romantic, soft-focus photography of the era known as pictorialism. In Robert Reid’s Woman on a Porch with Flowers, the woman’s dress seems to merge with the cut flowers and wildflowers in the scene. Frank Weston Benson’s Elisabeth and Anna, two women talking on a sunny shore, is startlingly similar to Alice M. Boughton’s photograph of Two Women Under a Tree in the TruthBeauty exhibit.

Alvin Langdon Coburn…Fifth Avenue from the St. Regis, c. 1904

Photography both freed artists from having to reproduce reality and reduced the need for painted portraits. But the early photographers in TruthBeauty wanted to elevate the new medium of scientific documentation to an art form, and so adopted a soft-focus approach using dramatic lighting effects that seem to be derived from romanticism. And it’s easy to find photographic examples that mimic the work of the American impressionist painters, such as Edward Steichen’s Flatiron-Evening,Alvin Langdon Coburn’s foggy Fifth Avenue from the St. Regis or John B. Eaton’s Wet Day in Melbourne.

The Impressionist Graphics exhibit includes works by artists not included in the Halff collection, such asMary Cassatt’s Peasant Mother and Child and J.M.W. Turner’s The Thames, along with artists in the collection, such as Hassam’s The Lilies and Maurice Prendergast’s Venice.

These three exhibits reflect the issues that American artists faced a century ago, breaking free of European traditions, incorporating the new-found techniques of impressionism into an American aesthetic and exploring new, more personal means of expression as advancing technology eliminated the need for artists to paint realistically.

An Impressionist Sensibility: The Halff Collection TruthBeauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845-1945 Impressionist Graphics at the McNay McNay Art Museum February 3 through May 9, 2010